1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to conformance testing methods and systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Business transactions over the Internet involve sending and receiving documents. The documents may be based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) or any other computer language. XML standards for Electronic Business Using XML such as ebXML Message Service Specification specify sequences in which documents need to be sent and received, a format (type) of the documents, and any time interval or other constraints a given sequence must follow. In this patent application, an XML protocol refers to a defined order for sending and receiving XML documents based on the constraints outlined above.
Interoperability tests are carried out in the industry to verify conformance of participants to an XML protocol. The tests require each participant to implement an application that can process received messages/documents and send messages/documents conforming to the XML standard. In this patent application, XML documents are referred to as XML messages to avoid an irrelevant discussion of packaging of documents into messages.
Currently, conformance testing is carried out as follows. Consider a participant interested in checking that its application conforms to a standard, such as ebXML Message Service Specification for example. The participant application (e.g. ebXML Message Handler) sends XML messages to a conformance testing system (CTS). The CTS processes the messages and responds with XML messages. The CTS can be another participant or an agreed-upon third party.
At present, the CTS must be an application implementation (e.g. ebXML Message Handler) conformant to an XML standard (e.g. ebXML Message Service Specification) for conformance testing to take place. In other words, the CTS must be a reference implementation of the XML standard specifications. Such reference implementation tests for the constraints in message sequences described above. Note that verifying the conformance of the type of the message to a particular XML schema is only one part of conformance testing.
The requirement that a reference implementation is used as the CTS has many inefficiencies that have broad effects on interoperability and conformance testing of XML standards. First, for conformity testing of each new standard, a new working application conforming to the standard is required. In the ebXML example, to conform to another standard such as RosettaNet Implementation Framework (RNIF) 2.0 in addition to the ebXML Messaging Handler, an RNIF 2.0 handler needs to be implemented. Second, more processing resources are expended by having concurrent conformance testing for multiple standards. Third, to make changes to the standard and to reflect the changes in the conformance testing involves effort in re-working the original solution.